Roberto Cotroneo
Presto Con Fuoco

The driver who insults you while you meticulously ride your bicycle.

The friend of friends, muscular and annoying, worshipper of his own manhood.

The lovely damsel, sunny and smiling, who looks at you as if you were the embodiment of stench.

The neighbor mummified in ties and leather bags, who doesn’t deign to greet you.

The Molossus dog and its Nazi owner.

Roberto Cotroneo.

I'm not friends with everyone. I prefer my swamp-breathed dog to most of humanity. No joke. If I had to save either Ronaldo or my black and snotty mutt, I wouldn’t hesitate: the Brazilian's soft bulk would eventually be drowned in the droppings of the whiny freeloader. I'm in favor of Saturday night massacres. If I could, I would hand out vials of concentrated alcohol at the exits of nightclubs and cut the brakes of all cars. I hate well-off ladies and their wrinkled ignorance masked by cheap good manners. I would decimate all these damn cyclists from fifteen to eighteen years old with the plague or a fusillade: have you ever seen them race at the velodrome? A bunch of eunuchs, squeezed into cock-crushing suits, dementia painted on the grim faces of two-wheeled warriors, as they shout, curse, lose their balls with doping of all sorts, and are rudely insulted by their parents if they lose. A clear example of how impotence, after fifty, leads to psychotic disorders.

In return, I love old people, especially those who speak little, those who rarely wash, ghosts, knights, obese brothel madams, the managers of the riverside tavern, the people from the dump, and Will Oldham. And, in reality, many other people, too.

But I do not love Roberto Cotroneo. Not him. I read his book "Presto con Fuoco" aided by a fierce fever and driven solely by a promise made to the one who lent it to me. I despised it. I found out he was a feared and famous slayer of others' works. I felt anger. I saw his pale and bespectacled face. The anger became fierce, irrational. I do not investigate the causes because there are none. I admit it: I hate Cotroneo with an irrational, terrible, ultimately pathetic bitterness. Like everyone hates someone without reason, I hate this scribbler. This ridiculous sentiment drives me to act childishly, producing this the first and only denunciation of my ordinary existence.

Cotroneo has allowed me to outline a description of the books that, in my opinion, will remain over the years and in hearts; the only books that do not represent a waste of time, a lack of enrichment, that are not a handful of pages causing only slight annoyance. The Great Book is written by a brilliant narrator, by a poet who lives his poetry and knows the word, by a profound and light stylist. Books born from writers not excellent, but deeply sincere or expert connoisseurs and disseminators of the subject they treat, are instead more valuable for understanding daily life in its many unknown aspects, to confront the moral sufferings of us ordinary creatures untouched by the burden of genius, to open interpretative horizons on society, on ancient and wiser civilizations, on technical and economic issues.
Authors like Cotroneo, or like Baricco or Elkann or a thousand others, will not remain in great literature, and today find no space next to the humble Manlio Padovan with his humanistic treatise on agriculture, or to Meneghello, Rigoni Stern, or Giulio Bedeschi.
In "Presto con Fuoco" there is so much of what, in my opinion, makes a book useless. The search for verbal virtuosity feels heavy, and this is a problem: not all writers are Baudelaire or Poe in terms of ability to unite the word on Art and the cult of the word itself. Cotroneo tries to penetrate the mind of a character endowed with immense genius. Unfortunately, the writer is not a genius, if he has gone down in (insignificant) history of contemporary Italian journalism more as a demolisher of others’ books than as an emulator of Montanelli. Cotroneo is not Mann, who describes the genius artist torn between bourgeois respectability and desires for freedom: Mann knows what he writes about, being a split genius. Cotroneo is not a genius, thus can only render a boring and pretentious image of our neurotic pianist; who also mocks his creator unbeknownst to Cotroneo himself: "I cannot stand the news, I only tolerate those that come from the past. The present is chatter: senseless talk, things fading into nothingness..." I imagine the virtuoso, by his own elitist and aristocratic admission, would not have appreciated "Presto con Fuoco", had he descended as a mortal on Earth from the empyrean where literary characters get bored: he would have been content, I presume, with his Nerval, Dante, and I don’t know what other readings. To all this, let us add a dime-store erudition that left me decently indifferent, between echoes of Schopenhauer (veil of Maya, Will and Representation: however! Always distant from the philosophical stereotypes one learns in high school our fierce critic of the prick...) and musical technicalities of dubious usefulness and of undeniable capability to gild (not even too) cultured these pages.

The classic little book meant to enrich the collection of some megalomaniacal old lady or some lost individual needing reassurance about his sensitivity as a reader; devoid of a precise identity, not wise, not a novel: you won't survive the winter, Cotroneo, accept it. Why do you write? Why do you publish? Questions that will remain, eternally, unanswered.

Spitefully yours,

a drinker of absinthe swollen with beer.

"And yet there must exist a calligraphy of passions" (Roberto Cotroneo, literary critic, failed writer, man with glasses, before being massacred by A.M. with a three-pronged pitchfork)

"What the hell are you saying?" (A.M., ardent local drinker before attacking Cotroneo with a three-pronged pitchfork)

"God Tape, I'm pitifully drunk" (E.G., ardent court blasphemer and hunter)

"Toga, toga! toga!" (John "Bluto" Blutarsky).

Sure, today I woke up in a bad mood. Have mercy on me.